Heroes 2.0 is out. You get a bunch of loot crates. I walked out of it with a few mounts and several Legendary skins (Mecha Dehaka, Demon Aluriel, Ghost Kerrigan, Butcherlisk). The other 'collectables' are just nonsense.

Gosh, this launcher of theirs is the worst performing program I have used in quite a long time.

Inconsequential patch. Still haven't seen any interesting heroes or changes come out, OW heroes are still in the game and really shouldn't be; they're just bland designs visually/stylistically with broken kits. The game still fights very hard for focus when you launch it. Most programs only try to pull focus once, maybe twice, Heroes is at least 3-4 times still.

I was only account level 35. I probably would have been much higher had I finished leveling the heroes I was getting to 10, like Valeera, but black man from OW really sealed the deal on my discontinuing play again. Plus, it was difficult to get 5mans going which is just no fun.

What the hell are banners even used for? Why even bother adding sprays? If it's something you can't customize like in counterstrike it really just shouldn't exist.

Nothing I got from the myriad of boxes was any interesting except for the pink heart mount. It did give me a good idea of how bad blizzard's color theory is, though. Soo many of the skins and their variations just look super ugly.

According to Blizzard's stats my winrates are much higher than hotslogs. Kerrigan is still at 73, I think butchee was at like 76. Lunara somehow at 65. Guldan is right where he should be at 40%, which still feels like it's a lot higher than what my games were like given every time I tried to play him we had pubbies.

The game just feels really boring to play now after 2 or 3 games, partly because of how much I've played the game, but mostly because of how there so many heroes now that are just not fun to play against at all.

I actually really enjoyed some games last night with Mesk, Bill, and Hicks, but I also uninstalled again when we finished the session and reinstalled Overwatch after we were done. (Still need to fix my hard drive issues...)

What the hell did they just do? Can you really no longer buy skins directly?

So Blizzard introduced Gems and Shards as new currencies in 2.0. You can buy Gems with real money, and earn a few bucks worth every twenty-five account levels or something. Shards are earned by chance when opening the new Loot Crates, or awarded if a Loot Crate gives you something you already own.

Gems can be spent on Loot Crates, Heroes, featured bundles (1 right now), featured skins (4), featured mounts (2), and stimpacks. In other words, if the skin you want isn't featured, you cannot buy it with real money. You can only gamble for it with Loot Crates.

All skins, mounts, and other vanity items instead cost Shards. You only get Shards by chance from Loot Crates.

I'm surprised no one learned from tf2, seeing how the game has had boxes you can open for $2.50, and especially how you could get digital hats worth 100+ dollars......and that one frying pan worth 1000 dollars somehow. It was ridiculous, there is a whole economy set up around tf2 items. The only item I could get that was worth anything was worth 20 dollars, and I kept it because someone gave it to me, and didn't want to upset them by selling.

humorously, I got dragged into some actual league games last night (not the lav friends ones, actual draft) and got to see what has happened to that game.

Ooooh man.

Last I played, it was all about getting CC'd to death, tanks being unstoppable engines of death that 2shot DPS, and AD assassins being unstoppable. Now basically everyone is either an AD assassin or an AP with invulnerability like Fizz. Unbelievably, Fizz does even more damage, his fish travels the entire screen and tries to track you, and shaco's dagger now has an AD ratio and does even more damage than his AP version used to. Humorously, my lane against a gold/plat Zed was the least eventful part of all the games and that has historically been a really shitty mu for me. After that, though, it was a struggle to not get 2shot by a 1-8 jinx, a jungle teemo, and ofc zed with that super balanced passive zed item that added a while ago. Meanwhile our support Veigar 1shot every single person that got near him, AP or otherwise, our Panthon could Q-AA and kill their support from full. Fights end in 2 seconds tops.

The game is basically like heroes now - a complete clusterfuck of people just getting 1shot everywhere.

And all the salt was contained on the enemy team. Our pubbies never said anything even when we fed kills nonstop in the first game. Both pubbies liked to do what Heroes pubbies do and split push silently while the rest of the team actually tries to do shit though (nearly cost us the first game as we had their core at 10% and died, meanwhile gp is just all the way back top mindlessly farming???)

It got me thinking about how Blizzard's trend has always been to release increasingly overkitted and overpowered heroes. League's new heroes I haven't really seen, but to me it seems like their item system has followed that trend instead. So even older heroes who didn't necessarily do a lot of damage are doing way more now. Of course, every rework has been more and more broken, so they've still got that Blizzard thing going on.

It baffles me how neither company has a competent game designer between them.